Ilana Glazer

Ilana Glazer’s face fills the screen in the first minute of the Broad City pilot, on a video call, and it takes a beat to work out what Lincoln is doing just out of frame. It is a filthy joke told with perfect manners, and it is the whole series in one shot. Glazer plays Ilana as appetite in a crop top, crouched and grinning, announcing plans that fall apart in the same breath, and she writes the character exactly as she plays her. We laughed out loud, alone, and that is not something we do often.

She came up through improv and stand-up at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre after NYU, and made Broad City with Abbi Jacobson first as a web series, from 2009 to 2011, then as fifty half-hours on Comedy Central from 2014 to 2019. Two broke women, one errand an episode, a city that gets in the way. For three seasons it is as funny as anything of its kind, and unusually kind underneath; the last two start telling us what they think and are the weaker for it. Glazer wrote, produced and performed across the run. She also directed three episodes, which is the sum of her directing to date.

That matters on a page headed director. The direction of Broad City is shared, chiefly by John Lee, Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs, with Amy Poehler taking an episode, and its best idea, the split screen that puts the two women in one frame from two boroughs, belongs to the whole run rather than to anything Glazer shot herself. What she brings when she does take the chair is what she brings to the writing: her own life, filmed where it happened. Of the Florida episode she directed, she has said, “I had the opportunity to direct it, and we shot it at a condominium complex where I was going to visit my grandma.” She is hands-on in production and in the edit while also performing, which on a fast half-hour comedy is a real skill.

Since the series ended she has moved into features, but as a writer. False Positive (2021), co-written with Lee, is a pregnancy horror; Babes (2024), which she co-wrote and acts in, is a comedy about motherhood and friendship. Both stay with what she knows, the female body and the friend standing next to it, and both take the Broad City material somewhere less comfortable, with the comedy tipping into horror or the gross-out. We have not reviewed either and will not pretend to a verdict.

So the honest position is this. Glazer is a writer and performer of the first rank in her form, and a director only occasionally, and only of her own material. The feature she directs, if it comes, will tell us more. We would expect it to be shot somewhere she has actually been.